Java Eyes

Setup Laboratory: Getting your environment working

The Java Eyes laboratory does not involve any programming, but is intended
to focus on getting the programming environment set up and working properly.
Frequently, the first laboratory period in a programming course preceeds
sufficient classroom instruction to go beyond "hello world." Since "hello
world" type programs are exactly von Neumann serial programming this
curriculum strives to avoid emphasizing, we reccomend Java Eyes instead.
Besides, googly eyes are much cooler than print statements any day.

The student source jar should be unpacked for this exercise, you may or
may not wish to have the students perform this step (and thus learn about the
jar utility). It is quite intentional that the code in the "student" jar is
incomplete. It won't compile without the cs101 utility classes. In
order to run the program from source you must learn how to supply our library
on compile time and runtime classpath in your IDE (or on the commandline if
you choose to work that way). On the way to this knowledge students will likely
learn other wonderful tricks like how to log in and where to find the
materials for the day's laboratory. Once the code compiles and runs, students
can break the code and see what a compile time error message looks like, how
to read it (and make sure it contains line numbers! if it doesn't your IDE
needs to have it's compiler settings adjusted, or the student has tweaked
things they shouldn't have. Optimized is not better!)

Disclaimer: The handout provided herin is directed at the specific
seetup used by Lynn at MIT when it was written. It is unlikely that it will
describe your setup, and you will need to write your own version.
(This is true with many of our handouts).

Usage Notes

One could use this exercise to learn all the sun utilities, including
jar, and javadoc, or the related facilities in the IDE.

Compiling multiple packages can be somewhat trickier than just a single
file. The source download of the cs101 jar can be used to practice or test
more complex compilations.

Screen Shot

This is what the program should look like when you get it running:

This page is a part of Lynn Andrea Stein's
Rethinking CS101 project, part of the Computers and Cognition Group
at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. EIA-0196404. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation